Sugar Developer Blog

SugarForge.org hit a major milestone last week when the 500th project was registered on the site by Kenneth Thorman with the Open Office SugarCrm plugin project. Brilliant!

It is times like this when it is fun to step back and reflect on the amazing momentum of the SugarCRM community. Can you believe that SugarForge.org is only three years old? I remember in late 2004, early 2005 when the community was asking for a collaboration site where they could focus on just SugarCRM. We really wanted to get the synergy of the Sugar developers focused around one site dedicated to the Sugar community. And so SugarForge.org was launched in March 2005.

Since then, the SugarForge site and the Sugar community have taken off. Not only does SugarForge.org now have 500 projects, but is also coming up on 13,500 registered developers and 4.5 million downloads in the next few weeks. With millions of web page views every month, SugarForge has truly become the focal point of open source CRM development.

So what has happened on SugarForge.org in these past three years?

• 78.1 million web pages viewed
• 4.38 million files downloads
• 13,487 developers registered
• 3,128 different files served

Now that is open source redefining CRM software.

It’s all great to talk about how wonderful the community is, but seeing the community actually meet in person is where the real fun is.

Did you make it to SugarCon two weeks ago? What a blast! The congratulatory emails have been rolling in from community members around the world who made the pilgrimage to Silicon Valley for SugarCon 08. Everybody enjoyed the mix of learning, sharing and partying. Kudos to John and the marketing team for pulling off a fantastic event.

I personally enjoyed the key note sessions quite a bit. We had Daniel Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs, kick off the event with the first key note. His irreverant and insightful commentary on open source and enterprise computing was a fun mix of hilarious and uncomfortable (thanks to Zack Urlocker for posting videos of Daniel’s talk and for NOT posting video 5).

Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, gave a fantastic talk on the future of enterprise computing and why he bought MySQL for $1B. That guy gets open source!

Paul Greenberg, godfather of CRM and author of CRM at the Speed of Light, also gave a great keynote about the future of CRM. He just posted his thoughts on SugarCon today in his blog and I couldn’t help but grin at his comments on the Sugar culture. But what I most enjoyed was his review of the enthusiasm of the Sugar community.

From his post…
That said, this was not just a good party but the conference itself was extremely well planned and well done and had some of that high spirited sense of community. What was particularly interesting to me was to see the genuine interest the customers, the partners and the developers had for the company, the people and the product itself. They liked it, sure, but they were INTERESTED in it and where it was going . They seemed to feel they had a stake in its success, which is as Shakespeare said somewhere, a “devoutly to be wished” position for a vendor to be in. Part of that was there seems to be an open culture and I hear from my friends at SugarCRM that they enjoy the ride they are on.
/end quote

Thank you to the Sugar community for being so interested, enthusiastic, passionate, ornery, demanding and flat out engaged. That’s what makes this “ride” so much fun!
Clint

Join Sugar Lead Architect and Master Module Builder Majed Itani as he walks through dramatic upgrade-safe customizations. Here’s your chance to see how far Sugar’s flexible architecture can be taken!

This free online webinar will be held on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 10AM PST.

To register for this event, please visit this link.

This webinar is part of the Sugar Developers User Group; we’re aiming to provide free webinars on a variety of topics, offered monthly as schedules permit.

Only a few days ago I disagreed with how Matt Asay had titled his blog post regarding the US government. So, when I read his post today on “Enterprise Software is dead - ask the Silicon Valley”, I thought, “great - more fodder to disagree with!” However, I was quickly humbled by his insight on the changing landscape of enterprise software.

This quote from Matt Asay’s post:

“As research from IDC shows, enterprise IT departments are increasingly the new software “vendors.” Building off open-source components, these enterprise IT staffs are finding great success in serving their own needs rather than shoveling dollars out the door to big vendors with one-size-fits-all value propositions. This is the 21st Century’s response to the 20th Century’s pillaging of enterprise IT budgets by the big proprietary vendors.”

From my own experience, I could not agree with this more. Increasingly I work with sophisticated enterprise organizations that have significant developer resources at their disposal. I’ve been very pleased to work with these savvy organizations because they “just get it”.

For this exact reason, vendors like Sales”farce”.com cannot compete with a product offering like SugarCRM. The SaaS model is perfect for those organizations, particularly the SMBs, that cannot successfully rollout a CRM system (at least from a technical level). However, there are plenty of SMEs and other enterprises that are not only completely capable of adapting SugarCRM to their businesses, but they need to.

Sugar is making it easier than ever with frameworks like the new MVC architecture released as part of 5.0 that allow presentation and controller extensibility that you just can’t do with SFDC. A great example is the forthcoming Wireless platform Sugar will be releasing. Another great example is the Module Builder. I was able to build a multi-componet module with complex relationships to create, record, and report on surveys for other modules. I was able to quickly build the module without ever having built a module before and then add the methods that I needed for the classes (modules) that I created. I cut my development time by probably two days. I leveraged other parts of Sugar to complete my module as well - like workflow, email templates and lead capture forms.

If you are a developer who is part of an IT team, and you’re reading this blog… then you are the new CRM vendor. How have you extended your CRM system in a way that can’t be done without code?

Technorati Tags: framework, Matt Asay, module builder, MVC, open source, platform

GPLv3 Q&A doesn’t seem like the hot topic we expected it to be. Andy Dreisch presented at SugarCON on the ramifications of GPLv3 on Sugar. I think from the tone of his post he left his presentation under-whelmed by the response (or lack thereof).

For those of you who could not attend Andy’s session, but want to be part of the GPLv3 discussion - The 451 Group is hosting a webinar on Feb 20th, complete with Q&A. I recommend that you attend if you want to understand the future of GPL and the Open Source.

Technorati Tags: open source, GPLv3

Matt Asay posted that The US Government Bets Big on Open Source. I love what Matt Asay writes and I think he’s poignant. He furthers “the cause” and we’re, as Open Source advocates, fortunate to have him.

So it is rare when I disagree with him - I hardly think of implementing Open Source as “Betting Big”. I frankly feel that all software implementations are a crap-shot if you don’t do due diligence, have an effective roll out plan, and train all the users. But it’s a real big gamble when it’s proprietary software. Who knows what’s in that black box?

One area of improvement I see for our government is in customer service. The Federal Government would really benefit from a Customer Relationship Management System… hmmm, if I only knew of an Open Source CRM system that really scales…. hmmmm….

On a more serious note, I spoke recently with a member of a state government (which will remain nameless) who heard this message loud and clear. They knew their weakness and that the constituents they served deserved better. I’m glad they made a choice to go Sugar. It’s not the first (or second, etc) state to use Sugar either. Which means to me that there’s a lot of opportunity at the local, state, and federal levels.

If you’re a developer in the public-sector, I encourage you to speak up about your use of Open Source and your use of SugarCRM in your organization. I know there are a lot of VARs and System Integrators reading this blog - I encourage you to look for opportunities in the public sector. It’s only going to grow from here, get there now.

Technorati Tags: government, open source

After turning down MSFT, YHOO has to come up with something that justifies why they will be valued at $44+ billion of their own accord. Even though GOOG was happy to intervene after the MSFT bid and take over search for them - they’re not so eager now that there is a proxy fight brewing. However, it seems like Rupert Murdoch is throwing his hat into the ring. Murdoch supposedly wants to mash up Yahoo! with MySpace and get a slice of the bloated valuation (thanks to MSFT) the MyHoo! entity. Ching!

Doesn’t this seem mixed up to you? MSFT has Facebook, which is built on PHP, Yahoo! is a PHP shop, MySpace is running on Cold Fusion, News Corp. isn’t exactly the “tip of the spear”, and Google can’t be the player it wants to be because of regulation (remember the DoubleClick).

I think as developers we’re at risk of losing a major contributor to the Open Source world. YHOO’s contributions to the OSS ecosystem, for example YUI, is an important part of SugarCRM 5.0 release. Even from a debugging level, we have Yahoo! to thank for Firebug. Yahoo! will become the banner ad-engine of MySpace and innovation becomes an after-thought. Do you think that kind of innovation and openness will still pour out of Yahoo! if Rupert Murdoch is sitting on the board?

Wouldn’t it be much more interesting if, rather than News Corp injecting Yahoo! with MySpace, Google and Yahoo! mashed up services as separate entities? Google and Yahoo! should take a stake in each other in an equity deal. The partnership would allow the two to take advantage of each other’s ad-network and/or search technology - while innovation in both organizations would further developers and the OSS world. I’d be happy to see the toolkits and frameworks that would result from that partnership.

What is the point of Open Source if you don’t contribute?

I just read a post over at TechCrunch about Firefox 3 Beta 3. It wasn’t so much the post, but it was the comments that got me. For example:

Aaron Stannard
February 12th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
I’m about to drop FF like a bad habit and start using IE again.

Webside Ventures
February 12th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
I gave up on FF and switched back to IE7 a while ago. I still use FF when I need to use the plugins, such as Firebug.

Seriously though, this is so obnoxious to me. Firefox is a free browser that’s a project where people dedicate their time to making something freely available. If you don’t like something, get involved! If something doesn’t work the way you want it to, GET INVOLVED!

How many of you want to contribute to the SugarCRM code base? How many of you want to add new features? What are the barriers to entry for you? What would make it easier?

Did you hear the rumors that SFDC offered itself to Oracle? Maybe it makes sense for Oracle and SFDC, but does it make sense for developers, the community, and customers?

Tom Foremski says that the two businesses are easily integrated because they’re based on standards. Maybe SFDC actually uses HTML, but APEX is far from an industry standard. How does that help the developer community and ultimately the customers / end-users?

Of course I am an open source advocate and a devoted MySQL user, but Oracle is a stellar database that scales. As a developer and also as the Advanced Support Manager for Sugar, I often find myself working with enterprise organizations that are Oracle shops. So why get stuck with APEX when you can have REAL open standards and flexibility?

If you’re going to develop for Sugar and you’re going to use Oracle - I *HIGHLY* recommend Zend Core for Oracle. It makes installation and maintenance and fine-tuning SOOO easy. My favorite part is that it’s FREE!

I’ve also learned that once you’ve installed Zend Core for Oracle, it would behoove you to upgrade to the latest oci8_client that comes with PHP. PHP 5.2.x+ has the best oci8 client from my personal experience.

What do you think about Oracle and its future? What tips have you learned as a PHP developer and from working with Oracle?

Jonathan Schwartz begins with outlining the parallels between the history of electricity and the future of the internet. He notes that all of Sun’s clients and many other vendors are focusing on the Social Utility of the network. Utility is an interesting word. I recall from economics 101, that value = utility / price. Software is the Utility and Open Source drives the price. The result is an immeasurable and infinite value. Sugar delivers this value.

As Schwartz notes, open platforms create ecosystems and ultimately serve the customer greater than just the product itself. By lowering the barrier to entry, as in terms of price, it becomes instinctual for us to consume that technology. Schwartz goes on to describe the economies of scale and the social network value of the ecosystem. It makes me think of the old quote “the value of the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts” because the market opportunity is expanding due to FOSS.